On Sovereignty

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roflv02i02_Andrew_060111.pdf

Political theory is an amphibious beast with one foot in the changing stream of history and another on the enduring ground of human nature and the human condition. Jean Bodin’s theory of absolute and undivided sovereignty was a product of time and place.

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roflv02i02_Bartelson_060111.pdf

The indivisibility of sovereignty

Indivisibility has long been among the defining characteristics of sovereignty. As Hans J.

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roflv02i02_Martel_060111.pdf

Cursed I call those too who must always wait; they offend my taste: all the publicans and shopkeepers and kings and other land- and storekeepers. Verily, I too have learned to wait—thoroughly—but only to wait for myself.

—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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roflv02i02_Carson_060111.pdf

Following Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, counterrevolutionary writing of the late eighteenth century entrenched itself in opposition to the speculative political programs emanating from revolutionary France.

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roflv02i02_Daub_060111.pdf

Whether or not sovereignty resembles, is founded on, or else opposes itself to paternal authority within the confines of the family has been debated (though not always in those terms) in Western political thought from Plato onward.

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roflv02i02_Lupton_060111.pdf

In the Spring of 1621, The Office of the Works at Whitehall, the main London palace of James I, prepared “the Banketting house with the History of Abraham for the king to take view of them.” References to this performance have surfaced sporadically in theater histories, but no known play text exists.

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roflv02i02_Stacey_060111.pdf

The longest, most lucid, and easily the most eloquent statement of sovereign power that classical antiquity bequeathed to subsequent political theory is provided by the sovereign princeps himself as he steps forward to introduce himself to a postrevolutionary Roman audience in the prologue of Seneca’s De clementia: